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In a dramatic repudiation of the government's investigation into accounting practices at AOL and PurchasePro, a jury acquitted all three defendants, former executives at the companies. This is the story of how that jury handed the Corporate Fraud Task Force one of its most resounding defeats. The jurors did their job, carefully weighing the evidence to come to a fair verdict. Says federal district court judge Walter Kelley Jr. who oversaw the case: "It was the greatest jury that ever happened anywhere."

The jury dug into the government's evidence of an AOL accounting fraud conspiracy -- and found it wasn't there

Amy Kolz

The American Lawyer

November 8, 2007

John Tom kept waiting for a smoking gun. A 63-year-old real estate agent and Army veteran, Tom had been sitting in a federal jury box in Alexandria, Va., for more than two months, listening to prosecutors talk about what they said was a vast, multimillion-dollar conspiracy between executives at America Online Inc. and officials at PurchasePro.com Inc., a Las Vegas software firm. Tom trusted the government. He came to court every day expecting the prosecution to be fair and to uphold justice -- an expectation that went all the way back to his junior high school civics class. But as prosecutors drew to the end of their case, he felt like he'd seen only what he calls "tidbits" of proof. "When the prosecution rested, I was astounded; I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop," he says. "We were all waiting for something drastic to fall into our laps, and it never happened."

On Tuesday, February 6, 2007 -- in a dramatic repudiation of the government's much publicized five-year investigation into accounting practices at AOL and PurchasePro -- Tom and his fellow jurors acquitted all three of the defendants whose cases they'd heard: former AOL executives Kent Wakeford and John Tuli and former PurchasePro senior vice president Christopher Benyo. Prosecutors had called 37 witnesses in their attempt to prove that the three men had helped their companies improperly inflate revenues through secret side deals and backdated contracts. The trial lasted for more than three months, an unofficial record in the Eastern District of Virginia. And yet jurors took only three days to reach not guilty verdicts on all counts. It was a shocking outcome in a district known for its conservative bent and low acquittal rate. "I was a prosecutor in that district for eight years, and I don't think anyone can remember a clear defense sweep," says Mark Hulkower, a partner at Washington, D.C.'s Steptoe & Johnson who was lead counsel for Tuli. "People [we knew] had the reaction of shock when, after a four-month trial, we found them not guilty," remembers juror Catherine Payne.

This is the story of how six men and six women handed the Corporate Fraud Task Force one of its most resounding defeats. White-collar cases are notoriously difficult for jurors, who are not usually versed in the intricacies of revenue spreadsheets. (Seventy-six percent of the major corporate fraud cases that went to trial since 2002 have ended in conviction.) The AOL jury was undaunted by that challenge: They filled legal pads with notes on complex accounting issues and conflicting time lines.

They refused to rely on assumptions, instead debating the testimony and exhibits. They held the government to a high standard that prosecutors failed to meet. In short, they were jurors who did their job, carefully weighing the evidence to come to a verdict that was fair, in spite of any expectations outside of their jury room. Says federal district court judge Walter Kelley Jr. who oversaw the case: "It was the greatest jury that ever happened anywhere."

When the jurors arrived in Courtroom 801 on Oct. 24, 2006, the first day of trial, no one was thrilled to be there. All had received a letter from Judge Kelley the month before, apprising them that they were among 350 prospective jurors for a complex criminal trial that could last as long as eight weeks. Each had filled out a 60-page questionnaire that probed everything from their attitudes toward defense lawyers to their television and reading habits. Each had been questioned in voir dire. And several had hoped to escape serving, worrying about demanding jobs or family obligations or, in some cases, just the responsibility. "I was always afraid of, not just the time commitment, but of making the wrong decision," says juror Alisa Gardner.

The original 16-member jury was one that prosecutors might fantasize about.

(Jim Rybicki, the public information officer for the U.S. Attorney of the Eastern District of Virginia, declined to comment on the composition of the jury or anything else in this story, citing the pending trial of former PurchasePro CEO Charles "Junior" Johnson, Jr.) More than half of the jurors had close ties to the military or jobs with the government. Sabina Schweinsberg, 47, for example, worked for the U.S. Postal Service and is married to a postal service federal agent. "My husband thought it was hilarious I got picked [given his work]," she says. And as a group, they took corporate fraud seriously. "I do feel there needs to be tough prosecution of white-collar crime," says Debbie Fogg, 50, who is married to the treasurer of a multibillion-dollar public company.

The prosecution started strong, say the jurors. Charles "Chuck" Connolly, the 38-year-old Assistant U.S. Attorney who led the case along with Adam Reeves, a senior trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, opened with a dramatic scene of a PurchasePro employee shredding and burning AOL-related business documents at his CEO's request. "It is a case about lies and cover-ups," Connolly proclaimed. Wakeford, a former executive director in AOL's business affairs unit; Tuli, a former vice president in AOL's Netbusiness unit; Benyo, a former senior vice president of marketing and network development at PurchasePro; and Junior Johnson, PurchasePro's former chairman and CEO, had conspired to inflate revenues at the Las Vegas company by tens of millions of dollars, Connolly told the jury. Then they'd covered up what they did. "My first thought was 'Man, these guys are in trouble,' " says juror Joe Randall, a 49-year-old manager with Computer Sciences Corporation.

Connolly proceeded with a rough outline of the scheme. In 2000 AOL agreed to help PurchasePro market its software in exchange for a stake in the high-flying Las Vegas company, whose stock was once worth more than $1 billion. But AOL had trouble selling the PurchasePro software, which provided businesses with an online auction system for buying supplies. AOL executives were only able to induce companies to buy by making secret side deals, some of which included free advertising on AOL's site. Under pressure to hit revenue targets as the dot-com economy collapsed, Connolly said, the defendants engaged in various forms of fraud -- backdating, forging contracts and making false and misleading statements to auditors to create a bogus picture of success for both PurchasePro and AOL.

Six former PurchasePro executives had already pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the alleged fraud. And Connolly promised to present witnesses and evidence that would "leave no doubt that crimes were committed." Each defendant, he said, played a critical role in the fraud. The AOL defendants, Wakeford and Tuli, had orchestrated many of the allegedly bogus side deals.

Wakeford helped to create fraudulent and backdated contracts. Tuli lied to auditors. And the PurchasePro defendants were just as culpable. Junior Johnson, the former PurchasePro CEO, had backdated and fabricated contracts, then tried to cover his tracks by directing documents to be destroyed.

Benyo had tried to make it appear that PurchasePro had completed its work on a multimillion-dollar business contract so the company could count the revenue in the first quarter of 2001.

The jurors liked Connolly. The young prosecutor seemed earnest and professional, someone who "wouldn't want to cause trouble for anyone who didn't deserve it," says Debbie Fogg. They were primed to hear evidence that would back up his allegations. But that goodwill began to evaporate over the first month of the case, as the government presented a string of witnesses who either failed to incriminate the defendants or were themselves not credible. The first prosecution witness was caught lying about his relationship with defendant John Tuli. Another offered notes of phone calls that, under cross-examination by Ben-yo counsel William Coffield of Lankford, Coffield & Reed and Wakeford counsel Henry "Hank" Asbill of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, turned out to implicate not Wakeford or Benyo but R. Geoffrey Layne, a former PurchasePro executive who had pled guilty in 2005.

The prosecution's stumbles only grew more pronounced as the trial went on.

In the third week, Paul Farrell, a former AOL senior vice president, testified that Tuli looked "uncomfortable" before heading into a meeting with PurchasePro's auditors in Dulles, Virginia, in April 2001. Farrell claimed that Tuli later told him he had deceived auditors about PurchasePro's work on a deal with another technology company. But when Tuli defense counsel Hulkower confronted Farrell with evidence that he was actually in California, not Virginia, during the time of Tuli's meeting, Farrell became very confused and started to sweat. "You don't even know where you was at? It wasn't credible," says juror Eugene Champion.

In the middle of Farrell's testimony the case changed dramatically. On November 9, after the surprise resignation of Junior Johnson's attorney -- Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe partner Preston Burton -- Judge Kelley declared a mistrial in Johnson's case and severed it from the case with the other three defendants. (The reasons for the mistrial are under seal and attorneys in the case declined to comment on them.) The government had presented Johnson as the linchpin of the conspiracy, the target of their strongest evidence.

Judge Kelley gave prosecutors a week to reorganize.

When trial resumed Nov. 16, the government had no momentum, jurors say.

Prosecution witnesses would testify to wrongdoing committed by the defendants -- and then defense lawyers would get up and punch holes in their testimony. "The defense lawyers put the prosecution on the defense all of the time," says Gardner. "They always seemed more prepared, and anticipated more than the prosecution." With multiple cross-examinations of each witness, prosecutors also struggled to present a clear narrative of alleged events. "We would be following the time line of Benyo, and then his attorney would get up and shoot a hole in that time line and direct [attention] toward someone else," says Randall, the Computer Sciences manager.

Several of the government's key witnesses were former PurchasePro and AOL executives who had been promised immunity or had cut plea deals with the government. Defense lawyers had an easy time assailing their credibility. In early December, seven weeks into trial, prosecutors called Layne, the convicted former PurchasePro cofounder, and James Sholeff, a convicted PurchasePro vice president who was Johnson's personal assistant. Both pointed fingers at Wakeford and Tuli. But jurors found neither believable.

Sholeff, who was so jumpy during his testimony that Judge Kelley had to call him into chambers, "was a terrible witness," says Randall. Layne changed his testimony on several points after conferring with his lawyer over a lunch break, and defense lawyers caught him in several lies during their cross-examinations. "You're saying in the back of your mind -- 'Is this person credible?' They've already been incarcerated, and even though they admitted that they lied to the SEC and grand jury, [we're supposed to believe] they're not lying now," says Champion.

As the trial crawled through its second and third months, jurors were growing impatient with the government. "It was so drawn out," says Jonathan Barrett, an economics student. "I kept thinking, if [the prosecution] was going to make their point, it should have been made by now." Testimony would drag on for days, with each witness facing direct examination, cross-examination by the three defense teams and then redirect. There were more than 800 exhibits introduced into evidence. Jurors say that much of what they saw and heard was tedious and complex: long e-mail chains and technical testimony about accounting issues and software links.

The jury worked hard to keep it all straight: Each juror filled between three and eight legal pads with notes. Laurie Pullin, a special education teacher, kept a table of contents at the front of each legal pad and earmarked pages to distinguish various witnesses. Franklin Bandy kept 5-by-7 note cards outlining corporate organization charts. "We took it very seriously, knowing that these people's lives were at stake and that the prosecution had spent a lot of time and money and years working on this," says Fogg.

Juggling private lives with the demands of the trial was just as difficult.

Some jurors had 40- or 50-mile commutes to the courthouse. Colin Phillips and Laurie Pullin were both planning weddings; Pullin found herself using the courtroom's pay phone to make calls to reception halls and photographers. Barrett was training for the U.S. National Rowing Team and had to sneak in hour-long bike rides around the courthouse each day. Bruce Nicholson and Alisa Gardner were starting new jobs. Sabina Schweinsberg was planning a move to Houston. As it became clear that the trial would run through December, jurors began using courtroom breaks to write holiday cards and do Christmas shopping.

It wasn't all tedium. Jurors became friendly with each other, making themselves at home in the jury room. Phillips brought in a microwave and Fogg brought in a coffee maker. Bandy, an amateur cartoonist, drew sketches of the group. They started calling themselves the "JBs" or "jury buddies," an irreverent reference to testimony that Sholeff was known as "Junior [Johnson]'s bitch." When the courtroom security officer forgot to turn on the white noise machine during a sidebar, jurors just imitated the buzz.

Sometimes they took their antics outside of the jury room as well. A few of the men on the panel, including Randall and Bruce Nicholson, liked to follow lawyers from the case onto the courthouse elevator, knowing that the attorneys, for fear of impropriety, would immediately step out.

The jurors came up with nicknames for some of the lawyers, calling Wakeford counsel Asbill "Wild Bill" for his unruly hair and special Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Donnelly "Lurch" for his dark glasses and the holes in his shoes. They joked about Hulkower, Tuli's attorney, who had a George Hamilton tan and elegant suits. They dished about the lawyers' quirky mannerisms.

Asbill had a habit of touching his nose and then looking up at the ceiling (or, they joked, perhaps at God). Hulkower would take off his glasses when stressing a point. Connolly was a poster child for Emily Post -- jacket always buttoned, hands folded and a respectful and professional demeanor that never wavered.

The one person they didn't joke about was Judge Kelley, whose professional, low-key style appealed to all of them. Kelley, a former Troutman Sanders litigator who was appointed to the bench in 2004, thanked jurors for their service on a daily basis and took frequent breaks to explain procedures that might be unclear. He had no problem chastising lawyers when they stepped out of line. "He had this demeanor of someone who had been [a judge] for ten or 20 years, even though it had only been two years or so," says Nicholson. The affection was mutual: Before the holidays, Kelley gave the jurors cookies, and they in turn gave him a "Jury Buddies" holiday card with one of Bandy's illustrations.

When the government finally rested its case on Jan. 4, the jurors were confused. "It was hard to see where the hell the ship was going," says Bandy. Prosecutors had presented a surfeit of witnesses and exhibits, but none of the evidence seemed particularly persuasive, say many of the jurors.

"There were so many little pieces of information presented," remembers Catherine Payne. "Things that seemed to be small pieces of evidence [ultimately] seemed to be a significant part of their case." Some had lost faith in the prosecution. One government witness had said during cross-examination that prosecutor Reeves neglected to show her all of the relevant evidence during interviews and tried to put words in her mouth, even when she disputed his version of events.

Not all the jurors believed that the government had overstepped, but everyone agreed that prosecutors had at times taken e-mail and isolated statements out of context. "The preponderance of evidence [the prosecutors] introduced was flashed on the [courtroom] screen so quickly. They would home in on one given paragraph and take that into the context that they wanted without giving us a chance to read the rest," says John Tom. In several instances, Tom says, the defense would then point to another paragraph in the same document that refuted the government's claims. And several jurors were bothered by Reeves's particularly aggressive style. "There were times when he was questioning a witness and he would say [to them], 'Just say yes or no,' and you would wonder what else is there, what were we missing," says Payne.

Jurors were hoping that the testimony of Kent Wakeford, the only defendant to present a defense, would clarify the case. In the eleventh week of trial, eight character witnesses spoke of the former AOL executive's honesty, integrity and commitment to the community. Then Wakeford himself took the stand. The jurors were riveted. After months of hearing about his actions and intentions, they were eager to hear his story firsthand.

Wakeford testified for more than 18 hours, provoking a range of reactions among jurors. Some thought he had a reasonable explanation for every allegation the government had made. Others thought he tap-danced around questions and overplayed his earnestness. "He was a bit of a weenie, almost too much of a saint," says Sabina Schweinsberg. But they all agreed that Adam Reeves's cross-examination failed miserably. "I thought, 'This is their chance to nail him,' " remembers Laurie Pullin. But Wakeford, she says, didn't concede an inch to Reeves. "I even said at one point out loud, 'Are you kidding me?' We've been here for four months and they had nothing. It was the most frustrating part of the whole trial for me," Pullin says.

Closing arguments filled the last two days of January, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Connolly delivering the government's final rebuttal in the late evening on January 31. Despite the prosecution's missteps over the course of the trial, Connolly's final argument was something of a comeback, say the jurors. He was eloquent in refuting many of the defense lawyers' claims. The verdict, they say, was far from certain.

When the 12 deliberating jurors marched into the jury room on the morning of Thursday, Feb. 1, their first order of business was to select a foreman: John Tom, whom everyone agreed was calm and levelheaded. The next was to assess how far away they were from consensus.

An initial poll established that they had a lot of work to do. Several of the jurors, including Tom, Randall, Fogg, Barrett and Gardner, were leaning toward not guilty verdicts for all three defendants. A few others, such as Champion and Schweinsberg, felt that Tuli, if not Wakeford and Benyo, was guilty. Others said they couldn't make a decision either way. No one felt certain enough to make a final vote. They needed to delve into the evidence.

It wasn't clear how they should start. There were three defendants each facing two charges -- conspiracy and aiding and abetting securities fraud.

(Judge Kelley had thrown out the government's wire fraud charges during the course of the trial.) "Everyone started talking at once," remembers Fogg.

Someone suggested that they divide into smaller groups that would present evidence on each defendant, but the panel said no. "We didn't want the evidence or opinions sifted through a small group," says Fogg. The jurors would have to tackle each defendant individually.

They decided to talk first about Benyo, the PurchasePro senior vice president. He would be the easiest to decide, they reasoned, since he was mentioned the least during trial. The jurors began to develop an ad hoc system. They would spend time reading Judge Kelley's nearly 100 pages of instructions (each had a copy) and going through their notes. Then they would pull the relevant exhibits from boxes to share with the group. Finally they would go around the table offering opinions. A few would get up to use the white board to make a point. Some of the more opinionated jurors, such as Schweinsberg, had a habit of interrupting others. But Tom and Randall made sure everyone got airtime, say the jurors.

Coming to a consensus on Benyo was harder than jurors had expected. There were some, like Randall and Barrett, who had wondered throughout the trial why Benyo was even there. His attorneys, Coffield and Terrance Reed of Lankford, Coffield, had emphasized that many of the government witnesses said nothing about Benyo. A good number hadn't even met him. But others on the jury, including Debbie Fogg and Laurie Pullin, weren't so sure. Benyo was the only remaining PurchasePro defendant in the case, and he had a clear financial motive for inflating the company's results: He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses and stock options. Benyo also helped prepare the press releases that contained PurchasePro's inflated revenue numbers. And he had directed a colleague to create an allegedly phony band-aid Internet link to convince auditors that PurchasePro's work on a partnership between AOL and another technology company had been completed in the first quarter of 2001. "I thought Benyo knew more and was more involved that what [his lawyers] claimed," says Pullin.

That Internet link and a related document, called the AuctioNet Statement of Work, were by far the most complex issues in the case, say the jurors. The government had alleged that the defendants fraudulently backdated the statement of work document, which defined a three-way deal between AOL, PurchasePro and AuctioNet.com Inc., an online auction company.

PurchasePro, they alleged, then convinced its auditors to count revenue from the deal, claiming that PurchasePro had fulfilled the requirements of the statement of work agreement.

During the trial, prosecutors argued that the statement of work required PurchasePro to integrate AuctioNet's technology onto AOL's Web site. At the time that PurchasePro recognized revenue from the AuctioNet deal, it hadn't completed the integration. Even Benyo's Band-Aid link between AuctioNet and AOL went up several days after the end-of-the-quarter deadline -- and didn't work anyway, prosecutors said. The defense countered that the AuctioNet statement of work was an evolving to-do list, not a fixed contract, and that satisfying any one of several requirements meant it could be considered complete. "We almost needed a flow chart," Alisa Gardner says with a laugh.

The testimony and evidence regarding the AuctioNet statement of work and related Internet link would influence deliberations for all three defendants. But when it came to Benyo, the jurors with technical expertise, such as Bruce Smith, a graphics design technician for the U.S. Department of Defense, pointed out that there is always maintenance on a link. The statement of work didn't seem to require a specific performance level. So Benyo's direction to his PurchasePro colleagues simply to put up a link and "circle back" later to fix any kinks didn't seem as incriminating as some jurors initially thought. "We came to the conclusion that Benyo was trying to quickly fulfill a simple requirement. He didn't have a criminal intention -- he was just buying time," says Fogg.

By Friday morning, the second day of deliberations, the group was ready to take a formal vote on Benyo. They found him not guilty on both counts.

Next up was Tuli. Tuli was a former vice president in AOL's NetBusiness unit, which prosecutors alleged depended heavily on the PurchasePro relationship. He appeared to be less entangled in the government's case than Wakeford, the defendant most frequently implicated by the government's evidence. But Tuli elicited the most contentious discussions among jurors.

Two in particular, Eugene Champion and Sabina Schweinsberg, were adamant that Tuli had lied to PurchasePro auditors when he declared in writing and in a phone meeting that PurchasePro had completed the AuctioNet statement of work by the end of March 2001. Proof of the deception, the government alleged, was Tuli's subsequent statement to internal investigators, in which he admitted that the statement of work was only 50-75 percent completed. "I thought he lied and that was proven," says Champion.

But other jurors pointed to evidence that Tuli had not deliberately misled anyone. He had checked with others at AOL about the status of the AuctioNet work and had been told that the work was completed. He had tried to confirm with his superiors and officials at PurchasePro what he was supposed to say to the auditors. Joe Randall and Jonathan Barrett argued that a person in Tuli's position, a midlevel executive with numerous other ongoing projects, could not know the status of every detail on one deal: He would have had to rely on what others told him. And the statement of work was so ambiguous, they said, that it wasn't even clear whether Tuli's statements to internal investigators contradicted his claims to the auditors. "In the end I got comfortable that [Tuli] was talking about two different things," says Champion.

The jury spent all day Friday discussing Tuli before deciding to break for the weekend. On Monday morning, the entire group voted in favor of a not guilty verdict.

By the time they began deliberations on Wakeford, the final defendant, discussions had become much more efficient. The jurors had already gone through a good portion of the evidence and they were comfortable with such issues as the statement of work and the AuctioNet link.

But Wakeford was at the center of the alleged conspiracy. He worked in AOL business affairs, the division that constructed the allegedly improper side deals between AOL, PurchasePro and various partners. He had day-to-day responsibility for AOL's relationship with PurchasePro and had worked down the hall from Junior Johnson when the former CEO set up shop in AOL's New York offices for two weeks in early 2001, a key time period in the alleged scheme. Wakeford had even accepted a $12 million check from Johnson -- an allegedly fraudulent sales commission payment to AOL.

Through the course of deliberations on Monday, however, the jurors found reason to rebut each of the government's assertions. They agreed that the timing of side deals for PurchasePro software was shady -- incentives simply to boost PurchasePro's revenues didn't seem right -- but they couldn't condemn the deals as illegal; the accounting testimony from the PurchasePro auditors and former PurchasePro executives didn't seem to them to be definitive. It just wasn't clear that Wakeford's acts were illegal.

Like Tuli, Wakeford had raised concerns about the PurchasePro relationship with his superiors at AOL. And Wakeford was the first to alert his colleagues that PurchasePro had given its auditors incorrect revenue numbers; that alarm ultimately led the PurchasePro board to uncover Johnson's alleged fraud. Wakeford had also made a convincing case that he knew nothing about the $12 million commission check that he accepted for AOL, but was simply directed to collect it by his superiors. Moreover, Wakeford's motive for allegedly participating in the conspiracy to inflate revenue was unclear. The government had argued that he and Tuli were motivated by AOL's sales commissions on PurchasePro software and by the pressure to close deals. "[But] it's not like they had $1 million in a bank account in Switzerland," says Randall. "What did they gain by what they did? They just kept their jobs."

Underlying the three days of deliberations was a growing unease that the wrong people were on trial. Defense lawyers had drawn jurors' attention to more senior AOL executives, such as Eric Keller, a former senior vice president in the business affairs division; David Colburn, the former president of business affairs; and Myer Berlow, the former president of interactive marketing, who had not been charged by the government. As the jurors parsed the evidence, they began to believe what Wakeford's counsel, Asbill, said in his closing argument: "This is the wrong trial with the wrong defendants at the wrong time." None of the defendants seemed to have had much to do with PurchasePro's accounting decisions; Benyo was outside Johnson's inner circle, and Tuli and Wakeford were ultimately just "worker bees," John Tom says, doing their jobs. "There were a lot of people we felt should have been on the witness stand or in court that were not," says Gardner.

Adding to their suspicion was the row of AOL attorneys who had been a constant -- and in the jurors' eyes disruptive -- presence in the courtroom. The jurors didn't know that Time Warner Inc., AOL's parent, had paid the Justice Department $210 million in a deferred prosecution agreement. (AOL also reached a $300 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.) But they did know that lawyers from McGuireWoods and Williams & Connolly would frequently interrupt the trial to object to testimony that potentially violated attorney-client privilege between AOL and its counsel.

(The Time Warner settlements permitted AOL to keep confidential some aspects of its internal investigation.) Many jurors suspected that AOL had sold the defendants out, and that its lawyers were now interfering with their trial whenever testimony concerned more senior executives. "We were all frustrated," remembers Fogg. "We had the feeling that there had definitely been wrongdoing and that people should be held accountable, but [the prosecutors] couldn't get the right people, so they just grabbed who they could."

It's impossible to know whether changes in prosecution strategy might have altered the jurors' final decision. Several jurors, like John Tom and Joe Randall, are resolute that the government had no case against these three defendants. But others aren't so sure. "I still don't think Benyo was completely innocent," says Laurie Pullin. "We thought they were guilty in some kind of sense," agrees Eugene Champion. If the defendants had been tried separately or with Johnson still in the picture, perhaps there might have been a different ending, says Champion. "It's a strong possibility, but we'll never know," he says.

When the 12 jurors filed back into the courtroom at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 6, the tension was palpable. Randall had resolved to look directly at the prosecutors when the verdict was read; he wanted them to know how strongly he felt about the decision. Laurie Pullin remembers that she had to keep her eyes fixed on Judge Kelley. "It was very emotional. I knew the once the first tear came, that would be it," she says. Indeed, as the courtroom deputy, Cathy Eichelbaum, read out the not guilty verdicts for Benyo, Tuli and Wakeford, her own voice quavered.

The defendants and their families broke down in tears. Several of the women on the jury did the same. Chuck Connolly, in keeping with his intractable professionalism, kept his hands folded and eyes down. But his colleagues were less subdued, according to the jurors. One prosecutor threw his pencil.

Joe Randall saw daggers in Reeves' eyes. (Reeves declined to comment.) A statement released on the day of the verdict by Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was the government's only public response to the acquittal: "I am proud of the extraordinary work our prosecutors and investigators did on this difficult case. Sometimes, jurors see things in a different way. We respect their decision."

Judge Kelley took the jurors out to lunch after the verdict was read. It was a celebration of a long ordeal now ended -- pictures were taken and toasts were made. During the meal, Kelley told the group that they had done an admirable job and delivered the right verdict. (The judge had acquitted Scott Wiegand, the former PurchasePro general counsel, in a 2005 bench trial.) Sabina Schweinsberg, the juror who had struggled the most with the not guilty decisions, wilted into tears.

The government hasn't given up on AOL and PurchasePro. Prosecutors are proceeding with their case against Junior Johnson, scheduled to begin in early October. (Longtime O.J. Simpson counsel Yale Galanter, who originally represented Johnson, is once again leading the PurchasePro founder's defense.) And the SEC continues to pursue civil charges against Benyo, Tuli and Wakeford.

For the jurors, the case is over -- but it has had a lasting impact on many of them. The trial shaped some jurors' views about lawyers. Catherine Payne admits that going into the experience she rated the honesty of defense attorneys below that of prosecutors. "That's changed," she says. For others, hearing the AOL case altered outlooks on life and work. "Work is not as important to me; [nor is] moving up or pleasing the right people. I like my job, but before I was more aggressive and ambitious," says Joe Randall. He used to rush through certain e-mails and record keeping, he says. Now he takes his time. Seeing the ordeal of Benyo, Tuli and Wakeford, Randall says, made him realize that "that could have been me."

A large portion of the group stays in touch by e-mail and has gotten together for reunion dinners. Several jurors say they are planning to attend the opening of Junior Johnson's retrial. John Tom, a naturalized Chinese American citizen, says that the trial reaffirmed his decision to become a U.S. citizen. Debbie Fogg now volunteers one day a week at the Fairfax County General District Court. "I'm a courthouse groupie," she says with a laugh.

All say they have a newfound respect for the judicial system and that they were proud to be a part of it. And that might be the biggest courtroom victory of all.